IRF

Signed in 1883, the Paris Convention established the right of citizens of signatory countries to file for patents in other members’ countries. It provides for a period of one year from the domestic filing date as a grace period for filing in other countries, while retaining the filing date of the first filing as the effective filing date in another contracting state. This treaty provides the basis for patent families based on the priority claim enabled by the treaty.

A legal document, issued by a government or regional authority, that grants its owner a right to exclude others from making, using, or selling the claimed invention within the patent country/region, for a limited period of time. In exchange, the patent owner discloses how to make and use the invention.

An “open for public inspection” publication of the original text of a patent application before going through the examination period.

International treaty allowing a national or resident of a member country to file a single application in his own country, which can be filed in any member country later. The States party to the Patent Cooperation Treaty (Contracting States) constitute a Union for cooperation in the filing, searching, and examination, of applications for the protection of inventions, and for rendering special technical services. The Union is called International Patent Cooperation Union. Filings under this Treaty are called International applications. The PCT agreement is implemented by the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO). WIPO is not a patent granting organisation and does no searches. It simply publishes the International Application with an International Search Report provided by one of the authorised patent offices and passes it along – at the request of the applicant and at the appropriate time – to those national or regional patent offices designated by the applicant for examination and possible grant.

Search for the country coverage of a particular invention. This is generally carried out by looking for any family members having at least one common priority (country +number+date). A number of databases exist where patents already have some patent family members grouped together in the same record – INPADOC, DWPI (Thomson Reuters), CAPLUS (Chemical Abstracts, FamPat (Questel), and PatBase (Minesoft) are examples of this. Different versions of patent families exist. The DWPI version is based on inventions. The Esp@cenet family is based on exactly the same priorities; the INPADOC family is based on any publications having at least one priority in common.

The graphical representation of how large numbers of patents relate to each other based on keywords, citations, applicants, patent classifications etc. A patent landscape reveals past and present activities of various top and small players in a given broad-spectrum of technology. It includes the white space analysis, which results in identification of problematic and safest research areas. It can also give insight to new potential areas, where there is a possibility of improvement. It provides additional insights, including trends in the IP activity over the time and who and what the technological progress had been made during a defined period of time.

A way to visualise patent mining results that involves clustering or otherwise orienting patent data on a page so that there is meaning in the spatial relationships among the data points.

A patent office is responsible for the patent granting process under authority of national or regional laws or multinational treaties. The World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) implements the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) and is the patent authority that conducts international patent searches and issues international patent applications, also called PCT applications and designated with the WO country code. The PCT applications may proceed to examination by individual country patent offices or regional patent authorities. Alternatively, patent applications may apply directly to country or regional patent offices. The national patent offices that lead in the numbers of published patent documents are: in China Patent Office (SIPO), Japan Patent Office (JPO), Korean Intellectual Property Office (KIPO), and the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), For more patent offices, see the Directory of Intellectual Property Offices maintained by WIPO. The regional Patent offices are: African Regional Intellectual Property Organisation (ARIPO), the Eurasian Patent Organisation (EAPO), European Patent Office (EPO), Organisation Africaine de la Propriété Industrielle (African Intellectual Property Organisation, OAPI), Patent Office for the Cooperation Council for the Arab States of the Gulf (GCC), and Nordic Patent Institute (NPI).

See Alerts.

Search in literature, products and patents for a defined feature that is considered patentable. For example, if someone is interested in patenting A+B+C in formulations for X then a search for A + B + C + X would be carried out. If all three components and the use X were found in a product, journal article or patent, then it would not be novel.

Rests generally speaking on three criteria: novelty, non-obviousness (or inventive step) and usefulness (or having industrial application).

Internationally agreed minimum requirement for a patent and non-patent collection to be used in novelty and inventiveness search by patent offices. The patent requirement encompasses complete documents from EP, WO, FR, GB, DE, CH, and US from 1920, as well as available English abstracts of JP and RU/SU. (Korea has recently proposed the inclusion of KR documents.) The list of periodicals required for PCT Minumum is maintained and periodically updated by WIPO. http://www.wipo.int/standards/en/part_04.html

Term used in some countries for patent-like protection for products. Details differ from country to country, but petty patents are usually not examined (or are examined only as to completeness and not novelty), and have a shorter term than regular patents. In some systems, these must be examined before bringing suit against an infringer, in others they are examined in court during the suit. Petty Patents are called "utility models" in many countries, or "Gebrauchsmuster" in Germany. Other countries use other names.

Patents covering asexually propagated plants (those that are reproduced by means other than from seeds, such as by the rooting of cuttings, by layering, budding, grafting, inarching etc. Plant patent numbers have a separate number sequence and are prefixed by 'P'.

Published application in United States. USPTO began publishing applications only in 2001. Prior to that year, US applications were only published if and when granted.

Is cited by a patent office examiner to demonstrate the patentability or to reject some or all of the claims of an application for a patent. Prior art can be a patent publication, or any other publication, including the internet, online databases, journal or book articles, illustrations, advertising etc. or a product, process or disclosure, whether oral or published, that was available in the public domain before the filing of the application at hand.

See State-of-the Art Search.

The number, country and date of the first filing for a given invention.

See Examination